The Enabler - portrait of Saskia Vormfelde

Saskia Vormfelde takes on her new role as Administrative Director in September – and she is bringing more to the table than just a knack for accounting.

There were nights when Saskia Vormfelde found herself pulling into Freiburg’s train station at 1 or 2 in the morning, still buzzing from a long day’s work in Hamburg. And in those moments, she recalls, she’d shake her head and wonder, “am I out of my mind for doing all this?” For years, she would commute clear across Germany once a week, but from here on out, life is going to be simpler: from her new home on the outskirts of Berlin, it’s just a 25 minute bike ride to HZB’s campus in Adlershof, and although Wannsee is a little further away, she’s not fazed by that.

The late-night train anecdote says a lot about her: when Saskia Vormfelde commits to something, nothing can hold her back, even hundreds of kilometres of inter-city rail. Until 2019, she ran a software company in Hamburg – which she built up as a subsidiary of two Berufsgenossenschaften. "Berufsgenossenschaften are the public providers for statutory accident insurance," she explains. “All work-related accidents that we cannot prevent are handled there.” Doing this armed her with two very useful traits for her future career: the excitement in helping to choose a strategic direction. And, she adds with a smile, “the fun in bridging the differences in mentality between IT and public service.”

The reason she’s now turning a new page in Berlin, at 51, goes back to a long-standing agreement with her husband: once the four kids were grown and out of the house, they’d start a new chapter. And the “new” part in this case is mainly the city and the Helmholtz universe – because Saskia Vormfelde is no stranger to research institutions. From 2020, she was Director of Administration at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Freiburg. With 1,400 employees and a 200-person admin team under her leadership, the institute is similar in size to HZB, except that the budget in Berlin is much bigger.

She knew early on that she would study business administration. Enrolling at the university in her hometown even turned out to be a lucky move: it’s where she met her future husband, a physician and clinical pharmacologist “with a passion for research,” she tells us. “He completely swept me up in his enthusiasm for science.” They met through ballroom dancing: both were competitive Latin dancers looking for a dance partner. Their coach introduced them – and the rest is history, says Saskia Vormfelde. They even went on to earn instructor licenses and spent a decade coaching amateur dance groups – until life with four kids took over.

In the early years after graduation, she stayed in academic professions. She worked as a research associate at the Institute for Accounting and Auditing before becoming a controller at the Göttingen State and University Library in Lower Saxony. She also taught accounting, tax law, and financial reporting at an adult education centre (Volkshochschule), at the Academy of Administration and Economics in Göttingen and at the University Göttingen.

A new path opened up for her in 2012 – though not in the way she originally intended. She had applied to the VBG – Statutory Accident Insurance in Hamburg, went through the assessment centre, and... didn’t get the position. Looking back, she sees it was a blessing in disguise. The organisation still wanted to take her on – but with something else in mind: “They offered me a place in their leadership trainee programme,” she recounts. That path eventually led her to the IT company she would later run as Managing Director and, in just a few years, would expand from the original 40 employees to a company twice the size.

But what ties all these things together: her years of working in the Berufsgenossenschaft, an IT company, and then ultimately research institutes? “I made the conscious decision already while studying to focus on the management of public institutions,” Vormfelde explains. “It’s an important area where I see the opportunity to really make a difference.” The private sector never really appealed to her – she’s more drawn to roles that contribute to the public good. And that’s the common thread running through all the positions she’s held.

This ideology is what still drives her in her new role. “What matters to me is that we never fall into an ‘us versus them’ mindset that separates scientists on one side and admin on the other. We’re all working towards the same goal,” she says. “I’m not a scientist, so I can’t contribute directly to the energy transition. But what I can do, with my team, is take things off the researchers’ plates, things we’re better equipped to handle – to lighten their load so they can focus on the science.” Her vision is simple yet powerful: “If we all see ourselves as one big team, everyone can do their job better. And whenever that happens, it’s incredibly rewarding.”

At the Fraunhofer Institute in Freiburg, she launched a number of initiatives to strengthen that team spirit: workshops to improve processes, lab tours, even a shadowing day where admin staff spent time in the science departments. “If a team of legal and procurement experts have spent months negotiating procurement contracts to buy new lab equipment – going a hundred times over every detail, fine-tuning the documents – it’s so nice when they finally get to see the equipment in use and see what it’s for,” she says. Going from Managing Director at her former company to Administrative Director in Berlin is more than just a change in title for her. “It gives me more room to shape things – and I really enjoy that,” Vormfelde says.

She and her husband have already found a place to live. The search was meticulously planned. “My husband approached it with the precision of a scientist,” she laughs. He drew circles around HZB on a map of Berlin to calculate commuting times by different modes of transport: which neighbourhoods and areas are easily accessible from there and by which means of transport? They don’t want to go back to hours of commuting every night. They visited flats within the target radius and sussed out onsite whether they could see themselves living there. Pretty quickly, they found the right spot. As for the future, they’re keeping things open – so they can stay driven by curiosity. After a 20-year break, Saskia Vormfelde has no plans to take up dancing again just yet. “We’re more likely to get annual museum passes and go exploring,” she says. After all, starting this new chapter at HZB is just one part of the story. Saskia Vormfelde has never lived in Berlin before – “and it’s high time I did!”

By Kilian Kirchgessner